Biography
Mohammed Rafiq Butt was a 55-year-old Pakistani national held on immigration charges during the detentions following September 11, 2001. He died at Hudson County Correctional Center in New Jersey on October 23, 2001. Human Rights Watch reported that the preliminary autopsy attributed his death to unspecified heart problems and that he had no attorney when he died.
His cellmate told Human Rights Watch that detainees helped Butt submit repeated requests for medical attention during the approximately ten days before his death, without a doctor seeing him in response. The report also noted that he had received antibiotics for a gum infection earlier that month. Human Rights Watch sought an investigation into his death and questioned the adequacy of his care. His case concerns immigration detention and treatment during the national-security dragnet; the sources cited here do not establish that he was prosecuted for personal political activism.
Previous biography:
Mohammed Rafiq Butt was a 55-year-old Pakistani man swept up in the post-September 11 dragnet on September 19, 2001, after a tip that proved baseless — the FBI found no connection between him and the attacks. Cleared of any terrorism suspicion, he was nonetheless kept confined over a visa overstay, and on October 23, 2001 he died of a heart attack in the Hudson County Correctional Center in New Jersey, having seen no lawyer and received no medical attention for his heart condition. He had engaged in no political activity; his case stands as an emblem of the arbitrary, discriminatory national-security detentions that followed September 11.
